All posts tagged FBI

Three prominent former national-security officials endorsed the use of encryption in communications, breaking with President Barack Obama and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey in their standoff with Silicon Valley over new uses of the controversial technology.

Former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn backed encryption in an eyebrow-raising editorial published Wednesday in the Washington Post. Read More »

Google Capital made a big bet on a cybersecurity company that names hacker groups after pandas and kittens.

The Google unit led a $100 million investment in Crowdstrike, an Irvine, Calif., firm with deep ties to Washington. Its head of investigations, Shawn Henry, is the former top computer-crimes official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crowdstrike’s D.C.-based chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, has a long history of calling out foreign hacker groups. Read More »

U.S. investigators are getting closer to pinning the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment to North Korea, said Rep. Mike Rogers, the outgoing chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Rogers’ comments mark the first public statements by a U.S. official explicitly tying Pyongyang to the cyberattack. As head of the Intelligence panel, he has access to classified briefings from three-letter agencies.

Speaking to reporters Friday at a breakfast in Washington, Rogers said that based on public information, he is “fairly confident” North Korea is responsible for the embarrassing hack. He was careful not to say that U.S. officials had sourced the attack to North Korea. Read More »

The Justice Department is turning to a 225-year-old law to tackle a very modern problem: password-protected cellphones.

Prosecutors last month persuaded a federal magistrate in Manhattan to order an unnamed phone maker to provide “reasonable technical assistance” to unlock a password-protected phone that could contain evidence in a credit-card-fraud case, according to court filings. The court had approved a search warrant for the phone three weeks earlier. The phone maker, its operating system and why the government has not been able to unlock it remain under seal.

The little-noticed case could offer hints for the government’s strategy to counter new encryption features from Apple Inc. and Google Inc., say privacy advocates and people familiar with such cases say. Read More »

Apple and Google have taken steps recently to let users protect information stored on smartphones – even from law enforcement. It turns out there may be a fingerprint-sized gap in that plan.

A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled Tuesday that police officers cannot force criminal suspects to divulge cellphone passwords, but they can force them to unlock the phone with a fingerprint scanner.

If applied by other courts, the ruling could become important as more device makers incorporate fingerprint readers that can be used as alternatives to passwords. Apple introduced the technology last year in its iPhone 5S and Samsung included it in its Galaxy S5. Read More »

A federal appeals court on Friday vacated the 2012 computer crime conviction against Andrew Auernheimer in a ruling that dealt a serious — but not fatal — blow to the government’s controversial case against the accused 28-year-old hacker.

Mr. Auernheimer is serving a 41-month term in a low-security prison for obtaining vast amounts of personal data of AT&T subscribers through a security hole in a company website and then leaking the information to a news outlet.

In throwing out the conviction, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the government had no right to bring the case against Mr. Auernheimer in New Jersey. Read More »

Related News:

Palantir Technologies, the “big data” miner that the counts the CIA and the FBI among its clients, is poised to announce a new round of funding that will value the company at roughly $9 billion, according a person familiar with the matter.

In a securities filing Thursday, Palantir is expected to disclose that it has raised $58 million in the current funding round, the person familiar with the matter said. The person said Palantir could expand the round to as much as $100 million. The names of investors could not be learned. Read More »